Growing up with the face of a bad guy

What westerns, cartoons, and racist rich kids taught me about representation in media, writes K.A. Jaggi in Electric Lit. Read on: 

In the third grade, my homeroom class watched a terrible western-style clip involving a gang of white settlers chasing a Native American boy across the desert. The boy was on foot, the white men on horses. The men were mustached, shoulders broad and square, hands armed with rifles. The footage was grainy, and there was little to no actual fact involved, but I suppose my memory might be faulty in that regard. What I remember most is this: at some point, one of my many torturers snickered to the class, “Hey, he looks like K.” From there, the movie became a sort of game. “Look at K run.” “K got shot.” “K has a flat face.”

We sat in darkness, the whine of the television fading out as I listened to their faux-whisperings. By the time the boy was cornered on a cliffside, most of the class was caught in a kind of chanting mob mentality. “Die, K!” “Shoot him!” I began to pray for his escape. Of course, in the end, the boy died. The lights came on, and the chairs were put away. Under the sudden, blinding hum of the fluorescent lighting, my classmates looked at my face and laughed.

Of course, in the end, the boy died. The lights came on, and the chairs were put away. Under the sudden, blinding hum of the fluorescent lighting, my classmates looked at my face and laughed.
I attended an expensive private school in Lower Manhattan for six years. My only friend in elementary school, who understandably abandoned me after the bullying reached insurmountable levels, was the child of a rock star and a model/actress. Like many first and second generation immigrants, my own parents worked themselves to the bone to send me to a “good school.” We lived with seven or eight people in our tiny Sheepshead Bay house, depending on the season.

While the children of the city’s white glitterati swarmed to their Caribbean babysitters at day’s end, my own Guyanese grandfather would meet me at the gate after taking the early guard shift at The World Trade Center. We took one or two trains and at least two busses to get home, where my grandmother would be waiting with curry, or roti, or dal. The trip lasted over an hour and a half; I was late to math class every single morning. If I was lucky, after dinner I could watch my grandmother’s prickly cunning decimate every contestant on Wheel of Fortune. In the beginning, I did not want for anything. I was fed. I had books and toys. In kindergarten, I only knew that I was ostracized: for the clothes I wore, for not having a mythical second home called a “Country House,” for the food I brought to school in tins and Tupperware, and for my skin. By nine, I only knew that I was miserable, and that sometimes I wanted to die.

On weekends, my father watched a lot of westerns. He seemed to particularly enjoy John Wayne. Every role blurred together: John Wayne on a horse, on a hill, talking down to a woman. John Wayne wearing a white shirt, broad-shouldered, tanned. After attending school with the children of cinematic luminaries, the distinction between actor and role was difficult for me to parse as a child. In my mind, here was Keanu Reeves fighting a bad guy. Here was Keanu Reeves crying about a girl. Here was Keanu Reeves wearing a cool jacket. (I really liked Keanu Reeves.)

If I was lucky, my father would put on Bonanza. Adam Cartwright was tall and handsome and gentlemanly. He wore a black hat, which I had never seen before in a Western. It made him seem dangerous, but in a good way, like Batman. I liked to watch him get on and off his horse. Eventually, although I didn’t know this at the time, Pernell Roberts tired of the series’ formulaic plotlines and his character left the show, which severely dampened my interest depending on what point the re-run schedule was at. Little Joe was handsome, but he was also far too stupid. He was always running off half-cocked, getting himself into trouble.

What I liked most about Bonanza was that there were no “bad guys,” with the notable exception of systematic injustices, which was important because the bad guys in westerns were almost always Native Americans. Occasionally, there was the Engrish-speaking Oriental, or the lone black extra, but mostly westerns were filled with a kind of racial resentment that my little brown head had no words to explain, despite being called “Walking Dictionary” and “Miriam Webster” by my tormentors. I didn’t have the language to talk about racism then, or the even more complicated racial imposter syndrome.

I wasn’t pale, or fine-boned, or hairless like the Chinese characters I saw on television. In the summer, I tanned to a rich tamarind that I cherished, while my mother burned lobster-red. Despite growing up speaking toddler’s Cantonese, I watched Jackie Chan Adventures and Mulan with a kind of quiet alienation, understanding that the characters did not look like me but not really understanding why. My Guyanese heritage was even more complicated. We were Indian, maybe, but also not. We were Caribbean, and definitely West Indian, but we were vehemently not black. Most people I met had no idea where Guyana was, and there were certainly no Guyanese people on television. I was, in a word, brown. And confused. I identified most strongly with Aladdin and Jasmine, who looked like me and weren’t from any real country, who were clever and oppressed and beautiful.

Most people I met had no idea where Guyana was, and there were certainly no Guyanese people on television. I was, in a word, brown, and confused.
Most of all, I was absolutely in love with Gargoyles’ Detective Elisa Maza. Maza was mixed-race and entirely non-white, intelligent, and kick-ass. She was pretty in a practical way that never interfered with her job, and she was never, ever objectified. She was everything modern racial justice advocates want from representation in media. When Salli Richardson was originally cast for the role, the showrunners changed Maza’s backstory and racial heritage to be respectful of Richardson’s mixed black and Native ancestry. This is a factoid that draws genuine awe from my friends when I tell it, as we now live in 2018, where whitewashing is a controversial norm.

Still, when I remember the actions of my fellow classmates, I am unsurprised at the current state of the industry. I know that I am not quite being fair. Children are, after all, often petty and cruel. They latch onto difference, and if that difference is racial, then so be it. I was harassed for my book smarts, my acne, and my asthmatic clumsiness as much as I was for my eyes or my race or my skin. But I was bullied for the latter, in the end, and the fundamental difference is that those children were never taught that there were some lines that should never be crossed. They were never taught that race matters, insomuch as they should not be racist.

In retrospect, it is easy to understand my affinity for Bonanza. The Cartwrights were about as egalitarian as you could get for a western. They often spoke up on behalf of the oppressed, and sometimes those people were even PoC. And while their Chinese cook Hop Sing wore a long braid and spoke Engrish, he was also allowed to have his own personality, his own feelings and desires. He was never referred to as Oriental, only Chinese; any use of the word “yellow” was firmly corrected. In “The Lonely Man” (1971), Hop Sing finds a traumatized young white woman, Missy, while prospecting in the forest. Missy is near-feral, but through Hop Sing’s patience and his superb cooking skills, he slowly coaxes her into a kind of quiet, comfortable companionship. Finally, in an incredible gender reversal and in contradiction to the ugly slavering stereotype exemplified by I. Y. Yunioshi and Long Duck Dong, Missy is the first to declare her love and propose marriage.

These days, I can talk for hours about the emasculation and feminization of East Asian men in American cinema. This would include a lecture on the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Page Act of 1875, and the way Chinese women were intentionally barred from the country to prevent Chinese laborers from creating communities or settling in the States. There is much to be said about the complexities of trauma, and what it means for a traumatized white woman to find a male Chinese cook with a long braid non-threatening. But I had no understanding of these concepts in elementary school, and so what I can offer is this: in the first grade, the aforementioned only friend of mine and I were caught between friendship and puppy love in the way only children can be. Sam* and I drew ourselves as Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask. We exchanged gifts on Valentine’s Day. But one of the other students was jealous, and at quiet reading time this student confronted me at the bookshelf and demanded to know my ethnicity. I answered absently, used to this question from viejitas on the train who thought me Chicanx, and less adorably, substitute teachers who liked to make a guessing game of my racial identity.

“Well,” Harper* responded, “if you’re Chinese, you should have a crush on the other Sam, because you’re both Chinese. And I’m white, so I should get to be with the white Sam.”

I don’t remember how I responded. Probably something along the lines of, “That’s really dumb.” What I do remember is that later, at the snack table, Harper was still dissatisfied with my refusal to back down. What followed was a Harper-led mob-style chanting of “K is Chine-ese!” over and over, complete with several children holding up their eyes at the corners, and the banging of plastic utensils on the table. The two other AsAm students in the class began to cry, notably including Other Sam (who might have actually been Southeast Asian, come to think of it, and not Chinese at all.)

My statement was taken, and then I was seated at the table full of twenty kids who had chanted my racial identity at me as a slur as though nothing had happened. In a way, I suppose, nothing extraordinary had.
Harper was not punished in any meaningful way for this transgression. I don’t think there was even a time out. When the teachers came back in from retrieving our snacks, they quickly rushed to the side of the two sobbing AsAm kids, and left me standing there in absolute confusion. I was not comforted, or even really addressed beyond a cursory glance, which in retrospect may have had something to do with Annie* and Other Sam’s Manhattan apartments, or maybe the fact that Annie was half white. My statement was taken, and then I was seated at the table full of twenty kids who had chanted my racial identity at me as a slur as though nothing had happened. In a way, I suppose, nothing extraordinary had; the teachers must have been used to looking the other way. Soon after this, Sam stopped spending time with me, or inviting me over, or sitting with me at lunch. When my mother tried to insist I deliver a Duane Reade bear-and-chocolate combo to Sam’s desk next Valentine’s Day, we had a blow-out fight about it. In the end, I thrust the bear into Sam’s hands and ran away.

After three weeks of idyllic meals and innocent flirtations in the forest, Hop Sing entices Missy into joining him at Ponderosa, the ranch where the Cartwrights employ him as their cook. He rushes into “#1 Boss” Ben Cartwright’s office to tell him that he is engaged to be married. Outside, Missy is hiding around the corner of the porch. She is dressed in one of Hop Sing’s black cheongsams; her red hair has been braided long in the back. She has, in essence, attempted to assimilate into Chinese culture as she knows it. When the broad, amiable Mr. Cartwright comes out to shake her hand, she flinches away from him; Hop Sing has to take her hand and bring the two together.

The look on Mr. Cartwright’s face in this scene is priceless. It is the look every white person should rightfully have in the face of systematic racism. He looks equal parts horrified and guilty, and the expression does not leave his face for the entire second half of the nearly hour-long episode. Ultimately, both the audience and Ben Cartwright know that his white guilt cannot save Hop Sing’s happiness. We know what Hop Sing and Missy do not: miscegenation was explicitly outlawed. It was not until Loving vs. Virginia in 1967 that anti-miscegenation laws would be banned from the U.S.. “The Lonely Man” aired in 1971; it is damning to think that even to a classroom of uber-rich white kids in 2002, the show’s message was still progressive.

The look on Mr. Cartwright’s face in this scene is priceless. It is the look every white person should rightfully have in the face of systematic racism.
In the end, Hop Sing does not believe Mr. Cartwright when he breaks the news. The heartbreak on Lorne Greene’s face, here, is excellent acting. His heavy brow furrows. He looks like a man collapsing in on himself. Against Mr. Cartwright’s advice, Hop Sing is determined to see the local judge. “He knows me,” he insists. Mr. Cartwright tries to convince him to leave Missy at Ponderosa, but the couple refuses. They go into town together, attracting the hateful glares of the white populace.

There is a story in Chinese mythology of a man who falls in love with the moon. Not the moon goddess, Chang’e, but the actual moon. He sees its reflection in the water, but when he rows out and dips his cup into the placid mirror of the lake, it always comes up empty. He spends all night outside in the dark, dipping his cup into the moonlight and coming up with nothing but lakewater and heartbreak. When Missy begins to warm up to him, Hop Sing comments that talking to her at first felt like trying to catch a moonbeam. For those who happen to be familiar, we recognize this as a foreshadowing.

Sure enough, when they reach the courthouse, the judge tells Hop Sing what the audience already knows, that the law is absolute, that they would both be jailed. By this point, the tension has built to a towering height, each scene more and more menacing. This is, in my remembrance, one of the most horrific episodes ever aired in a show that often traded in comedy and slice-of-life family drama. In the end, the mob waiting outside the courthouse for the “coolie” that is “chasing” a white woman is almost a relief. This, at least, is the devil we know. Here is the Chinese man beaten into the dirt, the sobbing woman re-traumatized, the teeming masses of white violence. Here is the end we always knew was coming for us.

(*Names have been changed.)

Surrogacy Bill puts donors at risk of exploitation, excludes single parents, queer couples

The Surrogacy Bill which was passed yesterday is a disaster to say the least. Which is tragic, considering how much time and effort experts in the field put in to persuade the government to correct this very flawed bill, which was tabled two years ago. The bill has been passed without incorporating any of the very valuable suggestions which were given at that time. Even on a totally superficial reading, the obviously discriminatory elements in it stand out.

A more detailed reading discloses how little the drafters of the bill have understood the medical need for having surrogates to help some couples (not all) who are undergoing fertility treatment.

Altruistic surrogacy reinforces the myth that a woman’s duty is to bear children and does not even take into consideration the effort and labour she puts into it.

The fact that she is putting her own life on hold for a whole year and undergoing medical treatment in order to carry a child for another woman has to be viewed realistically and properly compensated.

By insisting that only close relatives can 'volunteer' to become surrogates one more myth is reinforced — that the family unit is the safest place. In reality, families are known to be exploitative as well as oppressive. They could use all kinds of pressure to make a young and powerless relative offer the services of her womb for free.

As of now, during the fertility treatment and the hiring of a surrogate, caste and community do not come into play. The 'donors' of the gametes are anonymous, and fertility clinics do not normally give the intending parents a choice as to who the surrogate will be. Forcing intending parents to use gametes “altruistically” donated by a relative and also use only the womb of close relatives is in a way reinforcing old patriarchal and caste-based prejudices. It can also open the doors for emotional or even financial blackmail in the future.

Today, commercial surrogates are protected by the contract they sign with the intending parents. The intending parents too can be sure that they will not be blackmailed or subjected to extortion by the surrogates or their agents. Altruistic surrogacy takes away that umbrella of protection from both sides.

Excluding groups of people like single parents, divorcees, gay couples, couples who have been married for less than five years, is not only discriminatory, it also throws out a large chunk of people who are really in need this intervention to fulfill their desire to have children of their own. Requiring couples and surrogates to get eligibility certificates only introduces one more exploitable piece of bureaucratic red tape, which can be misused by agents to milk money from all the parties concerned.

The criteria for eligibility are very exclusionary and do not take into consideration the ground reality. All women who go through fertility treatments do not need surrogates. The help of a surrogate is required when a woman is unable to carry a baby for medical reasons, such as being born without a womb or having a damaged womb.

The womb is a very personal space for a woman. It is hers to use as she wishes. If she wishes to use it to earn money, it is her prerogative to do so. The only role the State has to play is to ensure she is not exploited by unscrupulous elements, and this can be done by recognising it as legitimate work and making sure she is properly compensated and insured and has the right to seek justice if she is exploited.

The bill has not addressed some important issues pertaining to the rights of the child and protection of the surrogates. For instance, it would have made more sense to ban people with criminal records, human traffickers, organ traders and others with a dubious background rather than law abiding citizens who genuinely desire to have a child. It has not also properly addressed several ethically as well as medically important issues pertaining to the use of gametes, the storage and use of embryos, as well as the use of the byproducts of ART for research.

These are just some of the problems with this flawed bill, which threatens to create many, many more problems than it set out to solve.

(Source: First Post)

The rise of queer comics

Gay comics are an ever-expanding feature of the field, marking a new era of self-expression. Comics used to be read paranoically as gay code; in contemporary comics queer identity is openly announced, writes Hillary Chute, an expert on comics and graphic narratives, and the author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists, and Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form, in The Paris Review. Read on: 

The fastest-growing area in comics right now may be, broadly speaking, queer comics—comics that feature in some way the lives, whether real or imagined, of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer) characters. Queer comics are one of the most vibrant areas of contemporary comics, fueled in large part by the runaway success of Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic—the story of a gay girl and her closeted, ultimately suicidal gay father that was adapted to be a Broadway musical of the same title, and went on to win the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015.

Gayness used to be a public accusation leveled at comics to discredit the medium: in the 1950s, Batman and Robin, and Wonder Woman, were suspected to be gay, and therefore a negative influence. Dr. Fredric Wertham wrote in his influential book on comics that the former represent “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together,” and for the latter, “the homosexual connotation of the Wonder Woman type of story is psychologically unmistakable … For girls she is a morbid ideal.”

The infamous 1954 Comics Code, inspired by Wertham’s study, banned “sex perversion or any inference to same”—a clear reference to homosexuality. But today gay comics are an ever-expanding feature of the field, marking a new era of self-expression. Comics used to be read paranoically as gay code; in contemporary comics queer identity is openly announced.

GAY COMIX NO. 1, ED. HOWARD CRUSE, COVER BY RAND HOLMES, 1980.

The excitement around queer comics, from readers and creators both, is rising steadily. Justin Hall’s compendium No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics, an edited collection, sold out its first print run in 2012.

Two cult classic graphic novels from the nineties, the artist and activist David Wojnarowicz’s Seven Miles a Second and literary critic and writer Samuel Delany’s Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York (both collaborations with illustrators), were reissued in deluxe editions in 2013 for new readerships. And 2015 marked the creation of the first annual comics convention to focus on queer culture: Flame Con. New York City’s Flame Con describes itself as “a two-day comics, arts, and entertainment expo showcasing creators and celebrities from all corners of LGBTQ geek fandom,” and specifies “geeks of all types are invited to attend and celebrate the diversity and creativity of queer geekdom and LGBTQ contributions to pop culture.”

Most significantly, however, the range and volume of queer comics appearing right now demonstrates how forcefully the realities and details of gay life can get expressed and visualized in comics. Diverse comics about all sorts of aspects of queer experience flourish online, in the direct and censorship-free zone of webcomics. And in the world of print, we see an outpouring of distinct genres of comics that explore and address queerness. Among the artists creating this work, Bechdel has shown most powerfully how comics can be a space for sophisticated storytelling about the complexities and joy of queer life.

Alison Bechdel's first published installment of Dykes to Watch out for in Womanews, 1983.

Bechdel was influential long before Fun Home, which was published when she was forty-five. Bechdel’s hugely important and popular syndicated comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which chronicles the everyday lives of a diverse group of mostly gay friends and lovers, began in 1983 and ran for twenty-six years; it changed comics culture and broader queer culture definitively. The guide Dyke Strippers: Lesbian Cartoonists from A to Z is even dedicated to Bechdel.

The film director Lana Wachowski, of the Matrix franchise (and a trans gay woman), wrote recently that although she was a fan of mainstream comics as a kid, and later the work of Robert Crumb, “It wasn’t until I discovered Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For that I really understood what I was looking for, a queer world with stories and characters that I could recognize, that I could laugh with and care about.”

SYDNEY AND MO IN BECHDEL’S STORY “SENSE AND SENSUALITY,” PART OF DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR AND COLLECTED IN HOT, THROBBING DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR (ITHACA: FIREBRAND), 1997.

The history of gay comics, however, doesn’t start with Bechdel. It has roots that go back at least to the underground comix movement of the 1960s and ’70s—and even earlier, too, if one considers classic comic-strip characters like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, one of the most celebrated characters in the history of comics. Krazy Kat (1913–1944) which debuted in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, featured a famous love triangle: The mouse, Ignatz, hates the cat, Krazy. Krazy, however, passionately loves Ignatz; even though the mouse throws bricks at Krazy’s head, they are received affectionately.

Offissa Pupp, a dog, adores Krazy and hates Ignatz as a result. Krazy is androgynous, a “kat” with a fluid gender that seems to shift and is never actually meant to be conclusively verified (sometimes the narration refers to Krazy as a “he”; largely, however, Krazy has been interpreted as female, including by superfan E. E. cummings). In an exchange from a 1915 Krazy Kat daily strip, Krazy complains, “I don’t know if I should take a husband or a wife,” to which the indifferent Ignatz responds, “Take care,” and hurls a brick.

That a syndicated strip published in a mainstream Hearst paper—Hearst adored the strip’s artistic merit and gave Herriman a lifetime contract—had such a conspicuously “genderqueer” star at its center indicates that queer comics, even if not hailed as such, have been lurking in plain sight for over a hundred years, at least. We might even consider queerness part of the DNA of comics.

Other newspaper strips have featured openly gay characters, some controversially. Garry Trudeau’s topical and political Doonesbury also introduced an openly gay character in 1976—early for mainstream comics. Readers first meet the character Andy Lippincott in a law library as the object of a female crush. In the Doonesbury storyline, after a yearlong battle, he dies of AIDS in 1990, an event that helped bring discussions about the disease into a wide number of homes. Andy is the only fictional character to be included on the real-life AIDS Quilt. (He later appears to longtime character Mark Slackmeyer in a dream to tell Mark that Mark is in fact gay, causing him to come out of the closet.)

And Matt Groening’s Life in Hell, which ran for thirty-five years starting in the late 1970s, featured the always-together characters Akbar and Jeff. Akbar and Jeff—also early and prominent gay characters who eventually became well-known in popular culture—are identical-looking men in fezzes and Charlie Brown–style shirts who initially were introduced by Groening as “brothers, or lovers, or both” but were soon acknowledged as gay.

Asked by a fanzine in 1987 if his characters had ever elicited a homophobic reaction, Groening replied yes. “The main reaction was when I first acknowledged that either of these characters could possibly be gay, some people who had been following the strip for years and had feelings about gays were very, very upset, which made me very, very happy.” (When Groening ended Life in Hell, a tribute poster was assembled; Alison Bechdel’s contribution was a fitting Akbar and Jeff tribute strip about the multivalent word “gay.”)

The newspaper strip For Better or For Worse, by Lynn Johnston, about a suburban family with three kids who age in real time, introduced one of its characters, Lawrence—a friend of the family’s son—as gay. In 1993, when Lawrence came out, For Better or For Worse was syndicated in hundreds of newspapers. The backlash was so intense that today Johnston devotes a portion of her website to explaining it under the heading “Lawrence’s Story.”

It may be hard to remember or imagine just how unusual sensitive gay content was for the “funny pages” of mainstream newspapers even twenty-five years ago, but within a week, nineteen papers had canceled For Better or For Worse outright, many more had suspended the strip, and Johnston went on to receive over 2,500 personal letters (in the days before email, no less), including death threats. “I learned that the comics page is a powerful communicator,” Johnston writes on her website. “I learned that our work is taken seriously.”

These widely popular strips, which each came at gayness from a different angle, provided important early examples of gay representation in comic strips. But the gay or queer characters they featured were secondary characters. It wasn’t until the underground comics movement, starting in the early 1970s, that gay comics as a self-conscious genre took root. In the underground, comics was reinvented as a medium for self-expression. It follows that the underground was also where political, identity-based comics were first developed, bolstered by the energy of the left-wing counterculture’s attention to disenfranchised voices—and also by women cartoonists’ reactions to what they perceived as the overly straight, overly male first wave of underground cartoonists.

The comic book Wimmen’s Comix, run by a collective of female cartoonists, developed as a platform specifically for women in 1972. And their debut issue (which is also where Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s comics first saw print) featured a three-page story about lesbianism, “Sandy Comes Out,” by Trina Robbins, a guiding force in the Wimmen’s Comix Collective. The story, about a young woman coming out and joining a “gay/hippie commune,” was framed as a “true life” comic about a friend of the artist (unidentified as such in the story, that friend was Sandra Crumb, Robert Crumb’s sister.)

DIANE DIMASSA, PANELS FROM HOTHEAD PAISAN, 1993. REPRINTED IN THE COMPLETE HOTHEAD PAISAN (SAN FRANCISCO: CLEIS PRESS), 1999.

While Wimmen’s Comix, and other feminist comics titles, acted as a corrective to the male-dominated underground comics scene, they were thin on gay content and gay authors. The perceived heterosexism of feminist underground comics inspired Mary Wings, then twenty-four, to self-publish the first full-length lesbian comic book, Come Out Comix, in 1973—a groundbreaking, stand-alone title that paved the way for queer comics of all different kinds to claim a place in the field.

The underground inspired that kind of creative practice: if you perceived a gap, you could fill it yourself. Soon thereafter, Wimmen’s Comix published its first lesbian contribution by an actual lesbian, Roberta Gregory’s “Modern Romance”—also, like Wings’s comic book, a coming-out story (Gregory would later go on to publish the hilarious comic book Naughty Bits during the 1990s, starring the character Bitchy Bitch, and a spin-off collection, Bitchy Butch: The World’s Angriest Dyke).

Wings followed up in 1976 with another comic book, Dyke Shorts. The work coming out of the underground was substantial, and personal, claiming space for nuanced stories that previously hadn’t found expression in comics—or in most other media. When Bechdel started drawing her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For in 1983, “there was already such a thing as a lesbian cartoonist,” she notes. “I didn’t have to invent it, or fight for it, or suffer over it. I just did it.”

Comics about gay men were slower to form, although the artist known as Tom of Finland, and his drawings of well-endowed muscle men, were significant to gay culture starting in the 1950s, along with plenty of other homoerotic fetish drawings and pornography. There were some gay-themed single-panel gag cartoons in the burgeoning gay press, like Joe Johnson’s campy “Miss Thing” and “Big Dick,” which appeared in The Advocate starting in the late 1960s.

The country’s oldest LGBT-interest magazine, founded in 1967, The Advocate has always featured cartoons and comics as a form reflecting, however humorously, on gay life. And Rupert Kinnard’s Cathartic Comics, an early version of which first appeared in his college paper in 1977 before later migrating to multiple alternative weeklies, notably featured the first continuing African American gay characters in comic strips—the Brown Bomber, a man, and Diva Touché Flambé, a woman. But the central figure in gay comics is surely Howard Cruse, a respected cartoonist raised in Alabama who began an underground comic strip, Barefootz (the titular character was always barefoot), in 1971.

Five years into its publication, the strip’s character Headrack came out as gay. Cruse knew this choice would mark his own public coming out, and though he struggled with the decision to draw gay content, he was encouraged ultimately by Mary Wings to take the leap into that subject matter. “Gravy on Gay,” in which Headrack comes out, is a story whose central plot point Cruse described as “an explosion of long-repressed liberationist fury.”

ALISON BECHDEL, THE ONLY DOUBLE-SPREAD IN FUN HOME: A FAMILY TRAGICOMIC (NEW YORK: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN). © 2006 ALISON BECHDEL. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Cruse became the founding editor of the field-defining comic book Gay Comix, published by the underground press Kitchen Sink starting in 1980. It may have taken longer than other underground titles to coalesce, but its significance has been enormous. (And it lasted eighteen years, longer than most underground publications, excluding Wimmen’s Comix, which lasted twenty years.) Gay Comix aimed for inclusivity and to consolidate queer underground comics. It came with the tagline “Lesbians and Gay Men Put It on Paper!”

Its first cover, by Rand Holmes, hilariously features a man walking down the street, stuck in a literal closet, ogling another man in shorts eating a hot dog. In Gay Comix, Cruse crucially frames comics as an uncensored art form in which stereotypes and expectations can be overthrown in favor of particularity and range. “In this comic book you’ll find work by lesbians, gay men, and bisexual human beings. The subject is Being Gay,” he wrote in the editor’s note.

“Each artist speaks for himself or herself. No one speaks for any mythical ‘average’ homosexual. No one is required to be ‘politically correct.’ ” For Alison Bechdel, discovering the first issue of Gay Comix was the single biggest event that sealed her fate as a cartoonist. “I’d been out as a lesbian for a couple of years, [but] the notion of cartoons about being gay had never crossed my mind. It was like, ‘Oh, man! You can do cartoons about your own real life being a gay person.’ ”

Devdutt Pattanaik reveals the queer history hidden in Indian mythology

The word ‘Queer’ came to me in my teens as something I could use to describe myself. In contrast, ‘Indian’ was a word I was born with. I owned both, but growing up, all I saw were various attempts to divorce them: the health minister who termed homosexuality a disease; the classmate who sneered “this isn’t part of our culture”; the teacher who thought it was only something white kids with dyed hair did. Of course, a few opinions hardly amount to the truth. And in seeking a tenable link between ‘being Indian’, I arrived at the work by mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik.

The author of 30 books and 600 columns, Pattanaik is a mythologist, an illustrator, an engaging speaker, and a management guru. But for many , he’s the guy who made a sizable chunk of India’s queer history accessible to a hungry readership. From the storytelling down to the trademark line art that fills the pages, thumbing through his books on Indian myths is an eye-opening experience. And “Shikhandi: And Other ‘Queer’ Tales They Don’t Tell You” is no exception. The book is a collection of myths from various Indian texts, like the Puranas, the Mahabharata, and the oral traditions of various Indian communities. Each of these myths reveal the fluid nature of gender and sexuality in India. First published in 2014, it has been re-released with the word ‘Queer’ added to the title. So we got chatting with Pattanaik about what makes this book so important. Read on!

Shambhavi Saxena (SS): “Shikhandi” utterly undoes what many of us have been taught – that rigid lines of gender and sexual behaviour are intrinsic to Indian society. When it first came out, was there any backlash? How did you react?

Devdutt Pattanaik (DP): No, there was no backlash. Most Indians are quite mature. I fear politicians and activists who are constantly manipulative. Most people are just bewildered as most of us don’t know much about our ancient texts, stories and philosophies. Our reading is very rudimentary.

SS: The new edition of this book very deliberately emphasises on “queerness”. Why did you think it was necessary to do this?

DP: Because we realised many people did not identify Shikhandi with queerness. So we abandoned the subtle approach and made things very explicit.

SS: This book is about “‘Queer’ Tales They Don’t Tell You’. Can you comment on why they don’t tell us? What can we as a society learn from these tales?

DP: I think they don’t tell us for many reasons. Some are embarrassed. Some do not know how to explain it. Some are disgusted. Some fear it will make us question established notions of gender and sexuality. Although Indian philosophy celebrates the fluid, Indian society is increasingly becoming rigid, because the traditional feel threatened by Westernisation and modernisation, also because many educated Indians feel powerful in making fun of all things Indian, especially Hindu.

SS: In the story from the “Yoga Vasishtha”, you wrote “The story demonstrates the essential discomfort of most Indians when it comes to sex. Sex is seen as something that takes one away from dharma.” Does this idea still have place in 21st century Indian society?

DP: Desire will always threaten social order. Queer desire even more so as it is unfamiliar and unpredictable. Buddha saw desire as the cause of suffering. In “Ramayana”, Ahalya’s desire turns her into stone. In 19th century we destroyed the devadasi culture by seeing it as exploitative and degenerate. Somewhere along the line, even today we valorize violence over love. We will kill a boy for kissing a boy. We prefer to see desire through the lens of sexual violence.

SS: You’ve written in detail about myths from around the world where female desire is suppressed. Are lesbian/queer women doubly suppressed in India? Is it because they pose some sort of threat?

DP: I think women are not allowed to talk about their sexual desire and feelings in general. They are expected to submit to marriage and family. A lesbian woman challenges all established norms. She is at a greater disadvantage as fellow women will also not support her. Imagine a lesbian woman born in a Dalit family in a tiny village in Odisha. Who does she talk to? How does she make sense of her longings? How will those who listen to her understand her longings? Is she lesbian first, Dalit first, Odia first, or woman first? The familiar comforts us. The unfamiliar frightens us and we react by rejecting it or violently suppressing it.

SS: You actually have a background in medicine. Can you shed some light on where India is going wrong with regard to healthcare for trans people?

DP: We still have doctors and yoga teachers in our country openly advocating ‘cure’ for gay and lesbian desires; this despite global scientific evidence. Transgender people are accepted in some quarters as it is physical and visible; gay and lesbian desires are not visible and so are not that accepted in traditional societies. We don’t understand desire at all, and monastic traditions teach us to view it negatively. We valorise celibacy which is unnatural and see desire which is natural as a disease.

SS: The final section focuses on Ram, in a story about embracing members of the trans community. However, unlike all the other figures mentioned in the book, Ram himself does not represent fluid gender or sexuality. What was your reasoning behind including him?

DP: In Hindu mythology, Shiva is more masculine and Vishnu is more feminine. In Vishnu stories, Ram is very masculine while Krishna is androgynous. So the rigid and fluid balance each other. Contrast this with Islamic and Christian mythology that have no room for the queer or androgynous. One does not have to be queer to include the queer; Ram is not queer but he includes the queer. That is the idea. The idea of queer is very much part of Buddhist, Jain and Hindu philosophy. In Buddhist mythology, “pandakas” or homosexuals were not allowed to be monks. So there was discrimination in Buddhism. But no one talks about this as we prefer to imagine Buddha as secular and inclusive, which is not quite true. He rejected the sexual, especially the feminine and the queer.

SS: In the book, you ask: “If a man uses medical science to bear a child and lactate, how would ‘modern’ society treat him?” At the risk of sounding like a lazy interviewer, I’d like to pose the same question to you.

DP: Modern society is equipped to include him, at least theoretically. But let us not forget such stories are found in traditional Hindu stories and academicians prefer to see Hinduism as ‘patriarchal’. There is a vast gap between theory and practice.

SS: So much of scholarship on queer culture in India has been a ‘retrieval’ or ‘recovery’ process, looking back at history, myth and local traditions. Are there any problems that come with trying to locate queerness in the past, that too from our modern – even westernised – perspective?

DP: We need to retrieve it as the ‘modern westernised’ perspective chooses not to see it and assumes modernity is its own invention. That is not true. Modernity, which is comfortable with diversity and mingling, was very much part of India’s past. Both the Left that thinks the worst of India and the Right that imagines India as heteronormative have a biased view of the past. We choose not to see the many diverse aspects of the past as it does not fit into our convenient, combative, and restrictive Left/Right politics. Past needs to be retrieved only to show that Indian society was fluid and inclusive in the past, and can be so do today. Not to justify the present. Not everything in India’s past is desirable (Sati or Caste for example).

SS: Do you have any advice for students and scholars working on contemporary queer culture in India?

DP: Beware of activists posing as academicians. Understand that there is room for rigidity and fluidity. And a functional society does need rules. So we need to be flexible according to context. And fluidity can be accommodated only with love, not anger (fashionable in many politicians/activists today).

How figures who transcend gender and sexuality would respond to the following common assumptions:

“Performing certain activities is entirely dependent on our biological sex.”
Gopeshwar (who became a woman to dance, in Vraj oral tradition) would say: “You have no clue how diverse the world is, do you?”

“It’s a woman’s nature to only find fulfilment in a relationship with a man.”
Ratnavali (who became a companion to a female friend in the Skanda Purana) would say: “You have no clue how much love can accommodate, do you?”

“A woman should keep her passions in check.”
Kali (who became a man to enchant milkmaids in the oral tradition of Bengal) would say: “You are terrified of the unfamiliar, are you not?”

“A child raised by two men will not have a good family life.”
Samavan (who became a wife to his male friend in the Skanda Purana) would say: “Let go of control, and learn to embrace alternate realities.”

(Source: YKA)